Abstract des Vortrags

The question of the Armenian Genocide continues to confuse the public and exacerbate tensions and conflicts between Armenia and Turkey, Armenians and Turks. Turkey is a country facing difficult problems at the moment, most importantly the detours on its road toward greater democracy and its failure to deal constructively with the question of the Kurds. The Turkish government’s campaign to deny that a genocide took place in 1915, or to blame Armenians for their own destruction, is part of a larger effort on the part of the Turkish state and Turkish nationalists to deny the troubled history of the foundation of the Kemalist republic. That denial is connected to the government’s inability to face squarely the problem of non-Turks, and particularly non-Muslims, within the current population. The central question of this talk is "Why Genocide?" There is a tendency on the part of some scholars — particularly Armenians — not to try to explain the genocide or to see it simply as the result of religion, nationalism, the nature of Turkish culture, Ottoman society, or the state. All of these are the questions to be asked, not the answers. Suny attempts to explain this genocide through a concept he calls “affective disposition” - that is, an emotional understanding of who the enemy was. The Young Turks and others constructed the Armenians as an existential threat to the Ottoman Empire and to the Turkish nation, what they conceived as the Turkish nation at that time. Armenians originally had been thought of as a loyal part of the empire, but by the late 19th century the Armenians became an instrument of certain foreign powers to intervene in the Ottoman regime and internal policy — the Ottomans began to see them as a threat.